Chinese fashion label MITHRIDATE is celebrating its first season on the London Fashion Week schedule with a deeply personal collection rooted in traditional Chinese culture and heritage. Inspired by her birthplace Yunnan, creative director Demon Zhang presents a collection bursting with bright designs and delicate details like pom poms in honour of the city’s bustling flower trade. A vivid colour palette further emphasises the town’s indelible ties to nature and evokes a vibrant childhood spent under the bright sun and immersed in a diverse cultural landscape.
Zhang returns to traditional Chinese techniques like tie-dying, fused with modern techniques like ice-dying, presenting a pathway between her youth in Yunnan and her formative years in London with a more experimental approach to design. Innovation is key to this collection, as Zhang plays with an abundance of fabrics including silk, denim, lace, and a locally sourced cotton that feels more like soft linen, this fluidity and softness are punctuated by hardware in the form of lantern charms cascading on the front of jackets, skirts and earrings. Elsewhere a slip dress is blanketed in hardware painted a deep blue shade, almost like armour, as Zhang embraces the brand’s ethos of “more is more” with a painstakingly ornate and detailed collection.
While the collection is co-ed, the entire runway is cohesive, each look features the same level of detail and wash of exciting colour. The boxier silhouettes are open, sho.